Free Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing by Sonny Brewer

sent. And we ain’t gettin’ nothin’ done talkin’.” Without so much as a word passing between them, the two men fell in tandem to their work, each starting the engine on his trencher and tilting the spinning blade into the soil of my yard. Dirt spewed as they cut the narrow slit, going off in opposite directions from a single starting point. Their work was precise, their movements fluid and graceful, and they spoke not a word.
    They’d not covered twenty yards each when Cormac came out the garage doors. I’d forgot the downstairs door was open into the garage, and the garage doors were open. This time the canine confrontation went differently—for two reasons, I think:
    First: The men were working.
    When a man gets going with his work, gets in the groove, not much can keep him from his appointed rounds. The task is not about excavating a trench of a certain length. It’s about putting one foot in front of the other, hands sure and deft on the machine, and then a ditch happens.
    This time Cormac did not faze these men. Maybe not even lightning splitting the heavens would have disturbed their trenching. I once watched a man dig a ditch in the rain of a thunderstorm and every time the sky burst with lightning and thunder shook the trees, he sped up. A trenching machine could not have dug a hundred feet any faster.
    Second: Cormac looked goofy and sounded silly with my son’s football jammed crossways in his mouth, open so wide it looked as though his jaw had come loose at the hinge. His eyes bulged and he was trying to talk around the football. Drew would love to see this, I thought.
    The men were now compelled to look at the dog standing a few feet away from them. They let their machines come to a quiet idle. Cormac stopped still, not approaching them any closer, as if respectful of their work. This time the mens’ eyes conveyed not caution or fear, but a kind of incredulity at the mumbling dog.
    Cormac’s articulations, shall we say, have two distinctly different voices. The first one he accomplishes with something in his mouth. Cormac’s second voice is a kind of purr he uses when he’s really laid back, like just waking up in the morning, a language I think he learned from our cat, Smokey. He will sit and look up at me as I’m putting on my socks, and with each exhale he goes, “awwwrrrrhhh.” Of course, I echo his sound, but only when we’ve got the room to ourselves. Our family hasn’t yet witnessed or overheard our unusual dialogue.
    The men surveyed the spectacle before them, looked at each other, and both grinned and shook their heads. Cormac’s football and humming had completely hooked them. The bigger man, John’s helper, laughed aloud. “Look there,” he said. “Ain’t that dog a sight?”
    “Cormac, put down the football! That’s not yours,” I said. He dropped his head, got a case of sad eyes, but kept his clamp on the pigskin. “Dylan’s gonna tie your ears together.” I put my fists on my hips and cooked up my best fake scowl. “Cormac!”
    “Hey, man. Why you wanna call a good dog like him somethin’ nasty like Floormat?” John rested, using his trencher handle like a walking cane. He caught his breath behind a laugh. Still flashing a good smile he said, “You oughta call him King, or somethin’. Floormat ain’t a name for a dog.”
    “No,” I said, catching the smile. “Not floormat. His name is Cormac. C-O-R-M-A-C.”
    And Cormac sounds phonetically close to cognac. When I would later be on the trail of my lost dog, and a veterinary assistant would tell me they’d had a Golden Retriever in their clinic whose name was Cognac, I believed that whoever had brought him there had read the name Cormac off his tag. I knew also my name and contact information on the same tag had been ignored.
    “Cormac, you say?” John asked. “What kinda name is that?”
    “The name of a king in old Ireland,” I answered.
    “Why don’t you jus’ call him King? Be easier, wouldn’t